Sir David Brown, chairman of Motorola, has said that the future of the Web lies in "seamless mobility". Brown was giving the keynote speech at the opening of the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday. Brown predicted a world where the same information would be available to you wherever you happen to be in the world.
The mobile Web is a key theme at this year's International World Wide Web Conference, being held in the UK for the first time. The W3C launched its Mobile Web Initiative at last year's conference in an effort to make the web more accessible from handheld devices.
Brown told the conference that seamless mobility wasn't just a matter of connectivity. "Seamless mobility is not continuity of bits, it's continuity of experience: The content you want following you around everywhere. The content adjusts, not you," he said. The "devices formerly known as mobile phones" would be the most important way of accessing the Internet, he said.
He also said that it was important that technologists don't try to dictate or control what people do with the mobile Internet. Recounting his early days as an engineer in Motorola's mobile phone division in the 1980s, he said that what happened to the technology wasn't what was expected. "Just like every generation of communications engineers before us, we thought we understood what was meant by mobility, and then went on to change that understanding."
To ensure that the mobile web succeeds, developers should allow users to create their own experience as much as possible, Brown argued. "The race of offer a more personalisable continuity of experience has begun. It's vital not to try to standardise continuity of experience, but to allow people to define it for themselves. That's why open platforms and open standards matter so much. That's why the mobile Internet matters so much", commented Brown.
Brown was keen to point out that predicting the number of mobile devices that could be in use would be naïve. He told the conference that the initial projection for the mobile phone market was 900,000 phones. Last year, that many phones were sold every nine and half hours worldwide. "Any forecast we are rash enough to make today could turn out to be more conservative than those about mobile phones in the early eighties," he said.
Brown also pointed out that the new generation of mobile Internet use needs to be global, not just in the developed western world. "In the UK, not only are there more mobile phones than land lines, there are more mobile phones than people. Yet two thirds of the world's population has no access to the phone. What if that digital divide could be bridged?" he said. "It's vital that we work to bring the socioeconomic benefits of seamless mobility to everyone."
